War is a Game (That is Played With a Smile)
by RowenaR
Summary: In the sea of idealists that is the Rebellion, pragmatists like Davits Draven stick out like sore thumbs. #4 The Battle of Endor is over, and Davits Draven isn't celebrating.
1. Take a Look at the Lawman

**A/N:** I'm back, with Rogue One fic. Nope, not the fix-it I always want to write when I listen to Rod Stewart's "Faith of the Heart" (or any of my favorites from the offcial Cassian Andor playlist, really) but for some reason an introspective bit on Davits Draven because fandom seems to have it in for the guy (to which they have any right. He certainly isn't one to stir up empathy or even sympathy, and that's more than merrited but maybe it's my age or my professional background but here's the thing: even a "noble" movement needs people who are willing and able to make hard, potentially unsavory choices, and that's what Draven is. Not all of his choices where right or even at least good choices but he made them, and let's all remember that _something_ must have made him join the Rebellion when he could easily have served the Empire, that something made him opt for a life on the run rather than a cushy seat in a nice corner office, and that's what drove me to take a closer look, I guess). So, uh... have fun reading it?

* * *

 **Take a Look at the Lawman (Beating Up the Wrong Guy)**

" _Sailors fighting in the dance hall  
Oh man!  
Look at those cavemen go  
It's the freakiest show  
Take a look at the Lawman  
Beating up the wrong guy  
Oh man! Wonder if he'll ever know  
He's in the best-selling show  
Is there life on Mars?"_

 _David Bowie, "Life on Mars"_

It's a clusterfuck.

That's what it all comes down to. Scarif is a clusterfuck of epic proportions, and you can't help thinking that deep down, this is somehow your fault. Having been a strategic analyst and a tactician for the better part of your life, you know it most likely wasn't, at least not the entire incomprehensible _scale_ of it.

But Andor. Andor _is_ your fault. Erso is, too. You don't need an in-depth Lessons Learned brief to realize _that_. It's a clear and harsh truth, cutting like transpari steel shards pressing into the palms of your hands.

And if you were being honest with yourself, if you looked past the strategic analyst, the tactician, the pragmatist, you'd find no shame in saying that it hurts like that, too. There's a war on, though. So you don't have the time to ever look past the strategic analyst, the tactician, the pragmatist, and so the war is a one of a kind blessing for you. Has always been that way, and you know you're past the age that would have allowed you to change that. Most of the days, it doesn't bother you.

The days after Scarif turns into a clusterfuck are not most days. Not even for you. More than half a lifetime of subterfuge, grey morals, carnage under your belt but Scarif fucks up even you. But you've been in the game of military intelligence for too long to give it more room than you can afford, and you can't afford any room at all for sentimentalities. There's a war on.

The transpari steel shards of Andor's and Erso's death don't care about that. They still dig into your palms at every turn, every time you make a fist, every time you put them onto the holo table in the briefing room. You've been doing that a lot since Scarif.

There's been a lot of work for an intelligence officer, after Scarif. Death Star has gone dark, Princess has gone missing, Death Star plans have vanished. How can a battle station the size _of a small moon_ go dark, how can a princess just go missing, how can those plans just vanish, you ask your subordinates over and over again and none of them can provide answers. None of them know the right sources, none of them know where to look, none of them have the guts to think for themselves. None of them are Andor. None of them are Erso.

You tell yourself that's why losing Andor and Erso cuts so deep. Tactically you couldn't afford to lose either, let alone both. Their skills, well-honed since early childhood and their grit and determination, that's what your subordinates here and your operatives out there are sorely lacking, and that's what's going to cost you the war. Tactically, losing people like Andor and Erso in a critical moment like now is a catastrophe. You've been a spy long enough that you can lie well enough to almost convince yourself with that.

It's not, at least, a complete lie. If there's one operative you would have tasked with the impossible assignment of finding a lost princess and recovering the plans the Alliance quite literally needs to survive, it's Cassian Andor. Andor delivered, _always_. No matter what you asked of him, he did it. Andor was loyal to a fault, to the Alliance, to _you_ , and even when he went against orders, he still delivered, still did it for the Alliance, did it, maybe, for you, knowing how your first, your only priority was, is and always will be the Alliance. You desperately need someone like that to continue your fight.

Erso, then. Erso would have made a _terrible_ soldier. Erso would have made a terrific leader. You didn't like her, saw the recklessness in her, the volatility, the disregard for authority. You saw the change in her, too; the recklessness turning into bravery, the volatility becoming passion, the disregard for authority morphing into a talent to inspire, to _lead_ others. She made a mockery of orders given to her, pulling Andor and that lot of other operatives down with her, down to sacrifice and greatness. She had potential. You _hate_ wasting potential.

Losing Andor and Erso puts the entire Alliance in jeopardy. Your entire job is to neutralize any and all factors that pose a risk to the Alliance. You fucked that one up good.

Deep down you know that this is not why losing Andor and Erso feels like transpari steel shards cutting into your hands.

Deep down you know it's because you trained Andor, formed him, made him into what he became. Because you're twenty years his senior, because you could have been his father. Fatherly feelings never got in the way of your professional relationship with him because they would have been inappropriate and impractical. Because you're not the fatherly type. But he was twenty years younger than you, and has been a soldier for almost as long as you have been and gets annihilated at twenty-six for that. That fucks you up, every time you think about it. And you think about it far too often.

Deep down you know it's because Jyn Erso was twenty-three, and was molded into a soldier around the same time you began building the Rebellion's military intelligence branch. It's because at twenty-three, Jyn Erso had been a soldier for nearly half her life, and all she got to show for it was a fast and painless death on a backwater world. You're a pragmatist, no time for sentimentalities but even you are convinced that it's not supposed to work like that. Even you get fucked up by it working like that, anyway.

You need to get to work; find the battle station, find the Princess, find the plans. You have no use and no time for dwelling on things you can't change, you only have time to order your adjutants to put together a Lessons Learned brief, file it away for future reference, make it mandatory reading for all operatives and handlers currently in service. You only have time to carry on and keep the Alliance alive because the Alliance is all you have and all you have to lose.

No family for you, no personal losses, no tragic backstory, only the bone-deep conviction and belief in democracy and rule of law, a democracy, a rule of law that Palpatine took from you when you still had ideals. It's all you have and all you will lose if you don't do your job, if you don't… "Sir?"

You're kind of grateful for the interruption from one of the comm techs working the listening stations geared towards Imperial space. Because if she hadn't, you'd have gone down a road you've been on too many times to count, a road you can't afford. You're not going to tell her that. "What is it, Sergeant?"

She blinks, looking confused, stoking your impatience and your dissatisfaction with your subordinates anew. "I uh… I just received a transmission from an Imperial outpost, sir."

You wait for her to elaborate but she just looks at you, with wide eyes, uncertain of how to go on. It's not doing much to alleviate your discontent. "So forward it to the appropriate sector group. Sergeant, if you don't know how to do your job…"

"It has Captain Andor's identification code, sir."

You have a split second to decide what to do with it, or you will lose face, or people will start talking about you again, about the pragmatist among idealists who can't make up his mind, who can't even keep his promise of being the one person who does what they all abhor and need him to do, who doesn't mind getting his hands or that of his subordinates dirty, who isn't the white knight they all want to be. You don't have to think about this one. "Forward it to my personal account, then." She swallows visibly, then nods. "Carry on, Sergeant."

Well, then. Could be a ruse, could be an ambush, could be nothing.

You tell yourself you're not excited. You almost believe it as you head to the nearest available secure comm terminal, nearly running Red Squadron's leader over in the process.

Could be the impossible. Could be Andor.

Could be a way out of the clusterfuck.

You find the terminal, open the message. You almost smile.


	2. Let Me Start Again

**A/N:** Whoops, wrote another Draven piece. Kinda not the fix-it I'd intended when I'd been mulling over Rogue One bunnies but yeah. There it is, anyway. And yes, it's a follow-up to _Take a Look at the Lawman_ because why the hell not. And oh, look, it's a multi-chapter now because apparently, I'm _still_ not done with Draven. Ugh.

I also would like to thank **fiesa** for the very long, very insightful review she left me on the first chapter. I still treasure that review when I feel useless at writing :)

* * *

 **Let Me Start Again (I Want a Face That's Fair This Time)**

" _Then let me start again," I cried,  
"please let me start again,  
I want a face that's fair this time,  
I want a spirit that is calm."_

 _Leonard Cohen, "Lover, Lover, Lover"_

It could have been a clusterfuck.

Another one, worse than Scarif, worse than anything that ever happened before in your career. It could have been a clusterfuck, and it ended up in a medal ceremony for a boy less than half your age from a backwater world and a smuggler completely lacking conviction. You even got a nice commendation from Mon Mothma yourself, honoring your part in the entire affair and both of you know it's not meant as a compliment or friendly gesture. You can live with that.

It could have been worse, you'd like to say, only that Alderaan is gone and no medal or commendation will ever be able to change that. No one has said anything but you know well enough that Alderaan is gone because you haven't done your job. You're not playing martyr, you just look at the facts and it's right there. If you had done your job, you would have never lost the Death Star's tracks and you would have known that it's heading towards Alderaan. You would have been able to give out warnings, issue evacuation orders, save at least part of the population, if not the planet.

You didn't, though. That's a fact. You selected the wrong operatives, activated the wrong sources, searched the wrong sectors. Those are facts, too.

It's painfully ironic, then, that you had the right operative, who knows all the right sources, and you chose not to activate him. Not for _that_ mission, anyway. Too many people involved, too many loose lips, too many incalculable risks.

Too many reasons why it would have been highly inadvisable to advertise that Cassian Andor is alive. You're still not one-hundred percent sure, having decided against sending out operatives for visual confirmation of the impossible, of Cassian Andor still being out there, against all odds. But you have cracked enough coded messages from the source claiming to be Andor to notice that his signature is all over them. Slicers, even the best, even the most careful ones, all have unique ways of coding, quirks and idiosyncrasies all over their code that make it easy to distinguish them from each other, if you know what you have to look for.

You have been receiving coded messages from Cassian Andor for nearly twenty years, enough to know his coding inside out. Enough to know his coding better than his voice. You wouldn't bet your life on that source really being Andor because you've been a spy long enough to know that bets are for idiots but you're damn near sure that you're almost tempted to do so, anyway.

You could have put him on the Death Star's trail, _should_ have put him on the Death Star's trail but then you would have had to explain where your information came from, to Mon Mothma at least because of all the council members, all your superiors, she never lets you get away with your need-to-know spiel and years in the Alliance have taught you not to fight her on that. You would have had to reveal that Andor is still alive, and that would have put him in very real danger.

Him and Erso because something, a hunch, a gut feeling, call it what you will, tells you that Andor isn't out there on his own, that at least one of those who went rogue with him are out there, too and you can't shake the feeling that it's Erso. You'd like to put it down to a stupid bout of _hope_ , something Andor always clung to so desperately, something you never had the heart to train out of him. Something you haven't let yourself believe in because hope never got you the same results that reliable sources and hard work did.

You'd really like to blame irrational, sentimental hope on your suspicion that Jyn Erso managed to escape Scarif, as well because that would make it easy. Jyn Erso actually being alive _and_ still working with Cassian Andor complicates everything a hundred fault. Andor always worked best when he worked alone or with his droid. Andor working with _Erso_ nearly got him killed.

So you decided not to tell anyone, instead logged the first transmission you received shortly after Scarif as an error, an attempt to use Andor's identification code for some advantage or other from an old source of Andor's and kept the truth to yourself. You're still in contact with him, have him running a mission for you behind enemy lines right now but as far as the Alliance is concerned, he's dead, and Erso's, too, just like the rest of them. It's better that way.

You're still not sure what made him contact you of all people. You who have been his mentor, his superior, the holder of his leash in equal parts. You who have used his utter loyalty in any way you could, in any way you had to; until he discovered that the person he _truly_ needed to be loyal to was himself. He could have stayed dead, could have stayed invisible, could have stayed _free_ and yet he still came back and asked you for a new assignment.

You gave it to him, after thinking about it long and hard, after considering to tell him to take Erso and run as far as he could, to stay the hell away from this war but you realized that he wouldn't when you realized that _you_ wouldn't. For all his fierceness at breaking away, at leaving the confines of his service to the Alliance, his service to _you_ put him in, he's still too much like you to do the smart thing. Andor might hate you, might even hate the Alliance for what you did to him but he's too much like you to hate the _cause_. So you took him back and didn't use him like you should have.

Ultimately, though, all of that is useless overthinking. You didn't put him and whoever he's working with on the Death Star's trail, and Alderaan is gone. That is what it always comes down to, and that is what you will have to carry around with you for the rest of your life. It's not the only thing, not by a long shot, but it's going to be a little heavier to carry than most of the rest of it, you know that, and you decide not to care. Not right now, anyway.

You're on the run again, and it's your job to make sure that you're not leaving anything behind that the enemy could use against you – not like Solo who didn't even think to check for anything they could have put on the heap of junk he calls his ship, Gods, that _still_ pisses you off to no end – and it's your job to find your forces a new home that _won't_ get shot up three days after setting up camp. The council finally listened to your incessant nagging about not putting all of them in the same place so often but that won't save the troops you will inevitably lose as soon as the Empire finds your new base.

So you have Andor and Erso listening to chatter, listening to leads on where the Empire will be most likely to expect you to set up shop next and you have parallel missions running to verify because that extra bit of paranoia never hurt anyone and you have a million other things to overlook and supervise and Alderaan is still gone and won't come back, so stop dwelling on it and get to work. You can go back to mulling it over when you have the time for it, when everything else is said and done but that'll be a long way off, that's always a long way off when you're on the run. There's a war on.

Thank the _Gods_ that there's a war on.


	3. You Got To Serve Something

**A/N:** Finally. This one was kinda hard, because I had a pretty hard time figuring out where I even wanted to go with this one but, as you _might_ have noticed, as I'm following movie canon with this and writing these as vignettes for the Original Trilogy movies, I had to do one for TESB, if I wanted or not and yeah, here it is. _Finally_.

And yes, I shamelessly stole the song for this from the official Cassian Andor playlist on Spotify. As much as fandom sometimes likes to pretend, Cassian and Draven are a lot more alike than they think. They have to be, because Draven practically raised Cassian. If there isn't a bit of each of them in the other, I'll eat a fucking taun-taun.

(also, yes, **fiesa** , I know I owe you a reply to your comment on the last chapter. I haven't forgotten about that, I'm just currently busy with freaking out over the officer candidate selection I've been invited to at the end of the month. Argh.)

* * *

 **You Got To Serve Something (Ain't That Right)**

 _"You got to serve something, ain't that right?  
I know it gets dark, but there's always a light  
You don't have to buy in to get into the club  
Trade your worries  
You gotta show up if you wanna be seen  
If it matters to you ma, it matters to me."_

 _The Avett Brothers, "Ain't No Man"_

It's going to be a clusterfuck.

Of _course_ it is. As soon as the Empire finds you, and they _will_ because they always do, it's going to be just another clusterfuck. At least the Council's off too warmer climes, you think and allow yourself to inject a sour note. You can't even blame being stuck on this ice cube on anyone other than yourself because it was your vote that sent you here. All things considered, Hoth was the best pick and it's been proven best by the fact that for the past two years, the Empire never even considered looking for you in this corner of the galaxy.

You have also been wishing Hoth _hadn't_ been the best pick for exactly those two years but then again, you can't have everything. Besides, it could be worse. You could be commanding the combat engineering branch instead of military intelligence. Hoth is every spy's dream for a safe house, and it's an infrastructural _nightmare_. Small favors and all that.

But as safe houses go, you know better than anyone here that it's they're nature to be _temporary_. Safe houses aren't homes. Safe houses are caves you use to lie low and to lick your wounds and patch yourself up well enough to be able to either finish the mission or make it to the nearest spaceport, because in the long run, inactivity _kills_. Two years is a long time for lying low and licking wounds.

Not that the Alliance has been inactive, but your professional paranoia keeps telling you that with every day you stay here and run your missions, skirmishes, battles from here, the greater the odds of one of your operatives not holding up under torture or one of your ships being tagged like Solo's was when they escaped from the Death Star or just some dumber than shit low-level Imperial underachiever stumbling over your operation become. You know you're the butt of a thousand and one jokes from regular infantry, support staff and the goddamn pilots but you don't mind. For most of them, it's probably better to dismiss you as some ever suspicious secretive bureaucratic pain in the ass who spends his day ordering his spooks around from behind his desk than to know only a fraction of the data that crosses that desk on a daily basis.

Most of them would get off this rock and surrender to the nearest Imperial garrison immediately, if they knew only half of that data.

The neks are closing in on this base. You find yourself wishing time and again it were just the ever-present paranoia every spy develops as an occupational hazard but it's all in there, all in the reports you receive daily from your operatives, all in the briefs your analysts keep pushing at you with the relentless stubbornness you bred into them. You keep telling Rieekan and he keeps nodding and taking you seriously and ordering the infantry and sappers to make improvements on the base perimeter defenses. You appreciate the taking seriously and the nodding and the ordering around. Nothing of that changes the fundamental truth that the only thing that could save the Alliance from another Scarif scale clusterfuck would be abandoning this base ASAP and scattering the fleet, moving around headquarters as often and as erratically as possible, like you have been advocating for since long before Yavin IV.

Nothing of that changes the fact that of all the people who could _possibly_ have happened on something like that, Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso managed to find a lead on something that punched you in the gut as soon as you read Andor's message. You're not easily spooked but _a second Death Star_ sent you into a full-blown panic attack that lasted at least five minutes. It's a good thing that one of the perks of being a general includes not having to share an office with anyone, even in the close confines of Hoth Base.

You didn't freak out, you never were prone to that, not even back when you were hunting Separatists in your first command as a green second lieutenant in the GRA. You just sat there, quietly, struggling to get your breathing under control, to breathe _at all_ and to keep the white, white walls of your cold and clammy prison deep beneath Hoth's surface from closing in on you.

It's not confirmed, not yet and so far, you have only shared it with Mon Mothma and she has finally learned when "need to know" isn't just you trying to hoard and restrict an intelligence officer's biggest capital – information, of course – and when she can push back against you and go ahead with it, anyway. You are one-hundred percent sure that right now, you, Mon Mothma and Andor and Erso are the only four people in the Alliance who know what the Empire plans to unleash on you, _again_.

You have considered pulling Andor and Erso off that mission – you're still the only one who knows they're alive, and you've had a bitch of a time concealing your source from Mon Mothma but she'd have wanted your head if you hadn't told her and you would have given it to her on a silver platter yourself, just this once – to order them to stand down and get the hell out of wherever they currently are but you realized it would be pointless because Andor never changed, not even after Scarif.

Andor is like a dog with a bone when he picks up only a whiff of something being not quite right, and Erso – tenacious, fierce, stubborn herself – working with him didn't do anything to change that. So you let them keep on investigating, going against your deep seated instinct to save a pair of good operatives from themselves.

A popular rumor about you has it that your devotion to your job makes you ruthless enough to regularly sacrifice operatives for the greater good but that's only half the truth, like all good rumors are. You do sacrifice operatives for the greater good, but you care. You care enough that you know every name of every operative that ever died in service to you, even those no one but yourself will ever know and remember. You don't even need a list or a directory or a file to remind yourself of their names. They're right there in your head.

You could easily stop that rumor, and you wouldn't even have to expose yourself for that because you could truly be the puppet master they all see in you, if you chose so. You could stop it but you care enough about your dead operatives that you'd rather have everyone think of you as ruthless and cold-hearted than come to you and ask you for those names, demand them to be made public knowledge, endanger their family, their sources, their contacts. You're their keeper, even after they're long dead and gone, and you take your job very seriously.

It's just a little too painfully ironic that of all your dead operatives the ones that are being remembered most – Andor and Erso – are still very much alive. You'd like to keep it that way – deep down you know that isn't just for strictly tactical reasons, deep down you know that it's about more than that – but they're making it exceedingly difficult for you.

One of Andor's greatest strengths was always surviving deep behind enemy lines, longer than any other of your operatives ever managed. You'd like to credit it to your training but the truth is that you'd never have made it even half as long as he usually did. You were good at field work but you were always _better_ at the big picture, at analyzing and strategizing and pushing figures on a war board. You never had that last bit of skill, of grit, maybe even luck that Andor always had and something tells you that even for Andor, skill, grit and luck won't last forever. You have a nagging fear that Andor and Erso used up all of theirs on Scarif and are living on borrowed time. And yet you know that pulling them off would just make them push deeper into Imperial space, farther away from you.

So you keep hoarding information, distributing it into carefully tailored bits to your analysts, to give you back the pieces you need to puzzle together the big picture, to figure out how to tell the rest of the Council about _a fucking second Death Star_ without compromising your original source. Without having to sacrifice them.

You also keep your lookouts and listening posts sharp, your trackers on target, your early warning systems honed because sooner or later, the Empire _will_ find you and your most important job is still to be one step ahead of them, in everything you do. You…

"Sir?" You turn towards the source of the voice, low enough to only attract your attention. It's Lieutenant Gre'kala, a Bothan female you tasked with commanding the group that monitors Imperial fleet movements. You can see the bristles in her fur, running down from the back of her head towards her neck, disappearing into her uniform collar. She's worried. You nod for her to continue. "Several battle groups just changed course. Nav projection gives one end point for all of them." She points towards her screen and turns to you, silently. The _Executor_.

You're not a Jedi. But you have instincts that have been honed in over twenty years of military service. You don't doubt the Lieutenant's conclusions for a minute. You nod at her again. "Notify High Command. _Quietly_." The _one_ thing you _don't_ need right now is panic, and thankfully Gre'kala is smart enough to realize that, too.

Across the room, you see Rieekan interrupt the conversation he just had with one of the logistics field grades, probably alerted by the padd he pulled out. After only a few seconds of reading, he looks up, right at you and even in the dim light of the ops central, you can see the grim, determined look on his face. He nods at you, taking you very, very seriously, as he should, and starts giving out orders, as calm and quiet as he can. You appreciate that.

As for you, you're determined, too. But you're not grim. Instead, you're _relieved_ because even with the clusterfuck this is going to be, you're glad to be on the move again. Hoth has been the Rebellion's safe house for far too long, and it has made a lot of people far too complacent. And _complacency_ is the _last_ thing you all need, if Andor's and Erso's information pans out as correct. You're _almost_ happy the Empire found you.

While over at Combat Command and Starfighter Command, levels of activity and noise are rising exponentially, you just gesture for your XO, quietly instructing him to trigger all necessary protocols for base abandonment – destroying equipment, erasing data, notifying operatives, sending out scouts – and then go to execute your personal protocols.

When you get to the point of notifying Andor and Erso of the coming "change of scenery", you get an almost instant answer, consisting only of a short coded one-liner. You don't even need to decipher it because it's the same thing you'd have said, and you nearly grin. _About damn time_. Andor might strain and push and pull away from you and you might keep telling yourself it's all about the bigger picture, but that's never going to change the fact that birds of a feather never quite leave the flock.

So it's going to be a clusterfuck, and it's only going to get worse, and you will have to remember so many more names when all this is over – _if_ you survive until it's over – but right now, you still have your two most valuable assets and you're on the run again and you finally get to leave this damn ball of ice. You still have a fighting chance.

And a fighting chance is all you need right now.


	4. If I Can't Get Clean

**A/N:** Yassss, I'm finally done with this series (because there's no way I'm gonna write Draven in the new trilogy. No. _No_.), and this one took so fucking long because, believe it or not, I couldn't, for the life of me, find a sentence to start with. I'm still not 100% satisfied with the one I used in the end but I'm mostly okay with it, and I really wanted to write this story, so, here you are. Mon Mothma even makes a guest appareance. Yaaaay?

* * *

 **If I Can't Get Clean (I'm Gonna Drink My Life Away)**

" _Son of a bitch, give me a drink  
One more night  
This can't be me  
Son of a bitch  
If I can't get clean I'm gonna drink my life away."_

 _Nathaniel Ratecliff & The Night Sweats, "S. O. B."_

It wasn't as much of a clusterfuck as it could have been.

You knew the intel, or you thought you knew. You didn't know it was operational, though, and that gnaws. All around you, people are celebrating, and that's fine. _They_ didn't send a fleet into battle with insufficient intel, responsible for the loss of nine capital ships, three transports and an as of yet unspecified number of smaller spacecraft. And their crew. That gnaws the most. Losing ships hurts, but ultimately, ships can replaced. Crew, they can never be replaced.

They all think you don't care about either – ships _or_ crews – and _some_ definitely think that you care more about the ships than the crews, and they're right and they're wrong. Ships are expensive, costing money the Alliance doesn't have and that's a problem. But ultimately, that's the Quartermaster Corps scroungers' problem, not yours. Lives lost due to insufficient intel, _that's_ your problem.

You're not stupid, and you're not sentimental, you know that war means that people lose their lives. It's tragic and it's unbearable and it's an inevitable tragedy, almost like a law of nature. But loss of life that could have been _prevented_ , with better intel, more reliable sources, harder work, that's not tragic. That's _on your head_.

There's the temptation of putting this on Andor's and Erso's shoulders. It's strong but it's not how you work. They aren't your only operatives, and intelligence doesn't mean relying solely on two operatives. You wouldn't be the spymaster everyone thinks you to be if you really only ran two operatives, if you didn't check and cross check and triple check and then again check every bit of intel your operatives gather, if you didn't have redundancies and fail-saves and emergency chutes built into each and every of your operations.

And yet, here you are. Nine capital ships. Three transports. Hundreds of smaller spacecraft. Fourteen-thousand three-hundred and twenty-five casualties. That you know of.

That's already a shitty tally, and it's going to become only worse once you put your people on it and get the Great Counting done that always follows a major battle and that always, somehow, ends up falling to you and your people. At the end of the day, it's you and your people who know the exact cost to any battle, no matter if it's a loss or a victory, and somewhere, at some point, you forgot how victory tasted when you were young and had the privilege of ignorance, of only knowing a piece of puzzle, not the bigger picture. Now it just tastes like ashes.

Well, that or the probably hazardous moonshine the locals are serving up tonight. The kind that someone just put next to you in a wooden cup in a deliberate and somewhat decisive motion.

You're about to tell that someone to shove their alcohol and their festive mood where it's dark, and go find someone to get you back to your maintenance closet of an office on the _Yavaris_ when you turn around and that someone turns out to be Mon Mothma. So. That's one person you _can't_ tell to go to Hell. Probably the only person you can't just brush off in the entire Alliance, and she decides to make you go with the program and the theme of the night. Figures.

She doesn't say anything, and for that you're grateful. She just takes a sip from her own wooden cup of moonshine and leans against the same rock you're leaning against, a careful measured distance of two hands between the two of you. You're perched on a small hill at the edge of the forest, far away enough from the reveling troops that you can overlook the small valley with its flickering bonfires and groups of celebrating troops and furry little locals. You haven't touched the cup of moonshine, not even after five minutes of silent watching.

"You don't approve of it, do you, Davits?" Your first instinct is to ask her what she means be "it" but she's not stupid. She knows that you know what she means by "it".

You cross your arms in front of your chest. Even though your fingers itched for that cup of moonshine, or maybe because of it. You choose not to dwell on that. "They survived. They're right to celebrate that."

"Ah," she makes in that conversational politician tone she always adopts when she's about to lead someone around the ring and then thoroughly trounce them in a discussion, "you don't disapprove, then. You just don't want to join in."

"Last time I checked, this wasn't _mandatory_ fun, ma'am." That came off passive-aggressive, and you regret it the moment you say it. It makes you look sour and ungracious when all you are is two steps ahead already.

You also expect her to correct you, once again. You have been serving under her for six years, give or take, and throughout that time she has made a continuous effort to get on first-name basis with you when you are off-duty, just like she did with the rest of her senior military and civilian staff. You have resisted each and every one of those attempts. She's your commander-in-chief, and you can't call your commander-in-chief by their first name, on or off-duty. You suspect that you are actually physically incapable of that.

She doesn't, in the end, and you're grateful for that. What she says instead, is, "You _are_ allowed to have fun without it being mandatory, Davits."

Yes, of course you know that. You know that you have a lasting and comprehensive reputation of being a humorless killjoy, and the truth is that it's not fully unwarranted but yes, at least the theoretical concept of "having fun" is known to you. "Of course," you hear herself telling her, "I just chose not to."

"Yes, that much is obvious." Is she going to chide you for _not going off the rails with victory_? You wouldn't put it past her. She has chided people for less. "What's really going on here?"

Well. That is even worse than being chided over not celebrating. This might look like a casual off-duty encounter but she's your commander-in-chief. For you, there are no casual off-duty encounters with your commanders. And when your commander-in-chief asks you what is really going on, you have no other choice than to tell her the truth.

Fine, you do. You always have a choice. That's what you believe in, even in matters as seemingly trivial as this. But for you, the only _right_ choice is to actually answer the damn question. "At least nine capital ships, three transports, and an as of yet unspecified number of smaller spacecraft. That's what's going on, ma'am."

She nods, and one of the reasons that you have never once considered jumping ship, even when you fundamentally disagreed with her or her decisions of her command style was that she understands. She _understands_ what those figures mean because she knows them herself, and she knows the _exact_ cost behind them. She _understands_ , and she _feels_ those figures. "I see." You believe her. She really does see. "Then don't have that cup to celebrate. Have it to honor."

So. That's not what you thought she would say. You almost expected her to tell you some bullshit about all those lost personnel not wanting them to dwell in sadness but you didn't expect her to tell you something as simple and elegant and logical as _that_. Honestly, you should have come up with that yourself. And the fact that you didn't expect _her_ to tell you something like that tells you that you really should work on your HUMINT skills.

To honor, then. You can't drink to your failure, or to a victory that's hollow for you but you _can_ drink to all those who didn't make it. You feel yourself cracking an involuntary half-smile. "I can do that, ma'am."

She smiles herself, in an "I get it" kind of way and you think that she does. She really does get it. She raises her cup. "To all those who were lost."

You think that you see a kind of gleam in her eyes, something knowing and you realize that she doesn't just mean all those they lost above Endor today. She means _all_ of them, everyone who lost their lives in service to the Alliance. She means Jheda and Scarif and Alderaan and the Pathfinders and Andor and Erso, and you're almost touched by that last bit. You alone know that they're not lost, at least weren't when you talked to them two days ago but she never forgot about them, you can see that. Four years, and even most people in the intelligence community have moved on, but Mon Mothma never forgot Scarif and everyone who had a part in it.

You want to answer her but somehow, your voice doesn't cooperate, and so you just touch your cup to hers, hoping she chalks up your silence to your usual taciturn self. You can see that she doesn't.

It bothers you less than you thought it would, and you're fine with that, probably because the local moonshine has some instant effect. You vow that this will be the first and only cup of that stuff you drink tonight. You really do have work to do.

"So," she says, and takes a generous sip from her cup, "where do we go from here?"

You're not sure whom she means with "we". For the sake of your sanity, you decide that it's a "we" meaning the Alliance, not that other implication, the one that would be more personal. "We," you say, putting the cup away and hoping your speech doesn't sound too slurred after only one of them, "do what we have been doing for the four years, ma'am."

She raises an eyebrow. "Fight the Empire?"

"Yes, ma'am." You're pretty sure that was just a rhetorical question. She's smart enough to know that it's not over by a long shot. Now, in fact, comes the hard part. The clean-up operations. The mobbing up of all those Empire outposts out there, all the battle groups that will no doubt refuse to go down without a fight, all the insurrections that will start up all over, fired up by Imperial agents buried deep within the civilian population on hundreds, maybe thousands of planets. The _nightmare_.

"That's the thing," she says and looks at you, serious enough that you find yourself drawing up yourself and half-dreading what she has to say, "we can't. Not forever. We can't be so afraid of peace that we'd rather have perpetual war, Davits."

She has seen through you, probably years ago. That's what she tells you, right here, right now. She says "we" but she means "you", and on a general level, one that doesn't have to do with you, she's right. At some point, you have to be willing to stop fighting, have to be willing to give in and go down another road, if you ever want peace.

But that's the thing: you have never known peace, not really. You have been a military officer, have been at _war_ for more than half of your life. You have spent practically all of your adult life waging wars; open wars, covert wars, but always, always wars. You have killed people, you have sent people to their deaths, you have ordered other people to kill, and you don't regret a day of that life. You were _meant to be_ that kind of being. You were meant to be a blade, sharp and always ready to use, and you will dull and rust and ultimately fade away if no one makes use of you. You are so, so _terrified_ by the thought of peace.

You consider telling her that, but Mon Mothma, with her razor-sharp politician's mind and her sheer endless capacity for compassion will just feel sad for you, will try to find another purpose for you, will want to help you. You don't _want_ help, though, and you _really_ don't want anyone to find you or your life choices or your entire existence _sad_.

You tell her, "Yes, ma'am. We'll get there." You hope. For everyone else, at least, if not for yourself. You _are_ capable of compassion and empathy, you just don't always chose to use it as your primary basis for decision-making. "We just _aren't_ there, yet."

And it's _your_ job to make sure that sure that all of you get through this, through the nitty-gritty of all the ugly covert wet-work that is going to follow this grand, heroic battle.

She gives you another look, this one with slightly narrowed eyes, assessing you and probably finding your lacking, like she always does when she looks at someone like that. "You're already plotting the next move. And the next three ones after that. Aren't you?"

Well. There's no use in lying. "Yes, ma'am."

"You know," she muses, and you're surprised again by what comes next, "sometimes I think we don't appreciate you as much as we should."

It's not like she's wrong. But all the disdain and the mocking has never bothered you, not once. Neither does it bother your analysts and your operatives, and you know that because every one of your people who _is_ bothered by it leaves sooner or later. Usually, rather sooner than later.

What bothers you are your failures, like Scarif and Alderaan and this one, here, and you know your analysts and your operatives well enough to know that most of them see it the same way. You consider telling her that, but once again, she would probably just move to reassure you, tell you that some things you _can't_ know, and she's right. But some things, you _should_ know, and you didn't and there's no way you're going to let her sugarcoat it.

So you go with something else. "We don't serve for appreciation, ma'am."

None of you do, because if anyone wants appreciation, they go into Starfighter Command or they join the Infantry. Those who join _your_ ranks, they don't mind spending their entire service in the obscurity of a deep cover assignment or a windowless compartment deep inside a starship or a stuffy office in the bowels of a backwater base, and they _like_ it that way. They _prefer_ it that way. "Appreciation" just means "attention", and intelligence personnel – both analysts _and_ operatives – are allergic to attention. In the intelligence business, attention means death. None of them are very fond of death.

"No," she says and smiles, "but _you_ 'll have to endure it for a bit for tonight." She… produces an entire crude wooden _bottle_ of that moonshine from behind her back and refills their cups and you briefly wonder how _much_ she already had to drink.

In the end, you take that cup again and give her an impassive face and the words, "If I must."

"Yes, you must," she tells you and raises her cup, with the words, "To the military intelligence community."

Well, you can't very well not toast to your own soldiers, so you raise your cup and touch it to hers and echo her toast and in the distance, some EOD personnel make another round of fireworks go off. There's some music from farther away, and singing and tomorrow, there will be hell to pay with a collective hangover clusterfuck of epic proportions but tonight, you don't begrudge them their celebration, and you don't even begrudge Mon Mothma her attempt at making you socialize. And to just plain get you drunk.

You toast again and take another sip and play along because she deserves it, after putting up with you for over six years, and you deserve it for putting up with her for over six years, and because tomorrow, things will be back to the usual wartime SNAFU, and you won't be terrified then anymore.

As long as there's still a war to fight, you won't be terrified.

You drink to _that_ the most.


End file.
